1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of determining the processing state of a photosensitive material and a method of correcting the processing state of a photosensitive material, and more particularly to a method of determining the processing state of a photosensitive material for determining the states of a processing solution and processing conditions of a photosensitive material such as a silver halide photosensitive material, as well as a method of correcting the processing state of a photosensitive material for correcting the processing solution and the processing conditions on the basis of the result of determination made in the determining method.
2. Description of the Related Art
The processing of silver halide photosensitive materials normally involves development processing in which the exposed particles that form the latent image are selectively reduced (developed) using a developing solution, fixation processing in which the unexposed particles are removed by dissolving with a fixing solution, and washing and drying processing that follow fixation processing. If the developing solution is taken as an example, the components of the developing solution are diverse, and include a primary developing agent, a preservative, a development inhibitor, and the like. Since these vary in a complex manner while mutually interacting depending on the processing conditions, items of analysis, i.e., characteristic values, for ascertaining the states of the processing solution and processing conditions of the silver halide photosensitive material are diverse.
Hitherto, to determine whether the state of a commercially available processing solution causes no problem in the photographic quality, a determination has been experientially made principally from the values of analysis of the solution components in light of their difference with the composition of a fresh photosensitive material processing solution. At that juncture, although the determination should be made not only from the mutual relationship between the components of the solutions but also by including the correlation with the type of the processing machine and the processing conditions, the determinations in many cases are made qualitatively on the basis of the values of analysis, and it has been difficult to derive a result of determination from the values of multi-dimensional analysis as in the case of the diagnosis of processing solutions.